SpaceX·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen
Aug 2026
Passed the first round for a SpaceX Starlink SWE intern role. The screen was purely experience-based, no coding, but the interviewer kept pivoting my project stories into technical follow-ups about tradeoffs and CS fundamentals, which was a bit unexpected.
- Walk me through a past project you worked on in detail.
- What were the tradeoffs of the approach you used in that project?
- Can you explain the underlying CS fundamentals behind what you built?
“Thought this would be a normal 'tell me what you built' kind of thing, but they kept pulling threads.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at SpaceX, Hiring Manager Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
View Post